Monday, December 24, 2012

I have to admit I did not make it all the way through
Wayne LaPierre’s statement Friday. The head of NRA spoke for about 15 minutes
from a prepared text and was twice interrupted by angry demonstrators who
demanded the head of the National Rifle Association “Stop killing our
children!” From LaPierre’s statement, it appears he is both a very good
strategist but, sadly, a man who is either incapable of or simply unwilling to engage in an honest, critical examination of the crisis in America arising from the guns his organization would protect.

What was apparent from the beginning in his statement was
that any discussion of a failed public policy surrounding guns was off the
table. LaPierre began by decrying those who would “exploit tragedy for
political gain,” assuring America that his organization’s primary concern was “the
safety of our nation's children.” So far, so good.

However, the focus on children was short-lived.

The pattern of NRA response historically in the wake of
mass-shootings has been to initially issue a statement of condolences to those
who have lost family members but to quickly follow that with an assertion that
“now is not the time” to discuss the policy implications of that carnage. Of
course, as in the popular song from the 1940s, Mañana, somehow the time for that discussion never seems to come,
thus revealing this as a thinly disguised defense strategy to protect privilege
through utilizing delay.

A second defense strategy the NRA has used historically has
been the use of diversionary tactics often involving scapegoats. And one didn’t
have to wait long Friday to hear that number warming up.

Monsters
Driven by Demons

LaPierre identified his targets in striking terms:

“The
truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters
— people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that
no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every
day.”

Indeed, they do, Mr. LaPierre. One wonders what kind of
demons drive the vision of gun advocates like yourself who appear incapable of
even considering the possibility that it might be their own attitudes and behaviors which create the carnage we all
abhor. One wonders what kind of monster would take a podium in the face of the
mass murders of 20 children and six of their teachers and argue that the unlimited
privilege which gun owners have enjoyed and presume to be their right, rooted
in a public policy which has clearly failed with catastrophic results, does not
urgently require reconsideration.

At the point LaPierre made that statement I found myself
angrily screaming at my television, “YOU are the monster!” And yet it’s precisely at times like
these that I realize that all of us have the potential to kill another human
being out of anger. As Alexander Solzhenitzyn has so aptly observed, “[T]he
line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes,
nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart --
and through all human hearts.” Had Mr. LaPierre been present in my living room I no doubt would have attempted to strangle him myself.

And that was the point I stopped listening.

Anthropologies
of Depravity

In all fairness I did come back to read the rest of his
statement. It is infinitely easier to deal with the words themselves without
having to watch them being delivered by a smug, angry white man observably
fearful of losing his unearned privilege. It seems clear to me that the
policies he advocates are, indeed, monstrous in their deadly results. But I also
believe there is more to this man than that. It’s not terribly credible to
presume that Wayne LaPierre gets up every morning and asks himself, “What
monstrous things can I say and do today?” even as that might be the end result
of what he ends up saying and doing.

His comments about being “possessed by voices and driven
by demons” are very telling. Many gun owners operate out of a negative
philosophical anthropology which presumes human beings to be dangerous,
untrustworthy, perhaps even demonic. It is not a coincidence that many of these
folks are also members of sectarian-spirited evangelical Protestant traditions,
descendants of John Calvin and company. This religious vision has long focused
on the radical individual before an angry, punishing deity and a human nature
rendered utterly depraved by archetypal events in the Garden of Eden. When one begins
from such a negative starting place, it’s not terribly surprising that everyone
can and, from this theological perspective, should
be seen as a potential enemy.

But fear tends to immobilize rational thinking. It also
tends to neutralize the human heart, immobilizing any semblance of empathy for
others. In all honesty, I saw little genuine concern for the children of
Newtown in LaPierre’s words or affect Friday. Instead, what I observed was a
white hot rage over the withering attacks his organization had sustained this
past week and an overpowering fear. That rage was only slightly cooler but
still palpable in the text itself as I read it this morning. The fear absolutely
leaps from the pages.

Fear, False
Dichotomies and Sophomoric Thinking

Mr. LaPierre has proved himself to be a master strategist
in defending an organization that represents just over 1 out every 100
Americans but successfully advances its interests at the expense of the rest of the population
at large. For that, he must be duly credited if for nothing else than the
efficaciousness of his methods.

But his thinking evidences a pronounced myopia that appears to make
it difficult – perhaps impossible - for him to even consider the possibility
that the interests he advances might ultimately prove destructive to others.
Such a reality would thus reveal himself
as the actual monster driven by demons of fear and his statement Friday an
unconscious - and no doubt unintentional - revelation of his own frightened inner state. Projection
always tends to be at least as revelatory of the projector as his targets.

There is also a decided brittleness in LaPierre’s
thinking which is readily revealed in statements like these:

“The
only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved
and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad
guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. ”

In introductory logic courses we teach our students about
a wide range of logical fallacies. A very common fallacy is the false dichotomy:Either X or Y. Such arguments often reveal either limitations of
conceptual awareness of other possibilities or, more often, the simple refusal
to consider them. They also evidence a tendency toward simplistic thinking. We
all want things to be as simple as possible, as Einstein noted. But as he also insisted,
our considerations should not require a subject to be seen in a simpler manner
than is possible. Beyond simple lies simplistic.

We expect some level of simplistic thinking from college
undergrads, hence the description of such fallacious thinking as sophomoric.
But when we begin to see an ongoing pattern of such thought in adults,
stubbornly resistant to all attempts to consider other possibilities than one’s
foregone conclusion and willing to actively ignore all evidence or arguments to
the contrary, we begin to suspect this might be a deeper problem.

William Perry, a scholar of cognitive function, observed
a pattern of developmental tendencies in human thinking capacities. He noted
that the structure of arguments advanced often revealed the given developmental
point from which they were being made. Perry found that the tendency to engage in black and white,
dualistic thinking is common to all human beings at very early stages of our cognitive development. But as human beings mature and become better educated, our
thinking tends to become more complex, nuanced, attentive to contextual
considerations.

While confronting black and white choices offered in
simple terms remains comforting to all of us, most of recognize fairly early on
that most things in life just aren’t that simple, particularly hotly debated
issues of policy. We also know deep in the back of our minds that even as we
would reduce complex issues to simplistic terms, we tend to sacrifice intellectual
honesty and ethical integrity for the comfort of an artificial certainty. This, in
turn, necessitates the operation of repression to push such awareness from our
conscious minds. The first person we lie to is our self.

Complexity
and Intellectual Courage

To his credit, LaPierre did point toward some of the
complexity in this crisis yesterday when he spoke of the lack of mental health
treatment in America (thank you, Mr. Reagan). He also pinpointed the feeding
frenzy surrounding these issues practiced by a mass media which has learned
that stimulating fear also stimulates viewership and thus exposure to the
consumer advertising of corporate sponsors. And he noted the normalization of
violence which feeds into this problem through entertainment media from video
games to the carnage which nightly presents itself as regular television
programming.

These are all aspects of the problem America must solve.
And LaPierre is correct when he points to them as facets of a deep-seated
problem. But where his arguments fail is the reduction of the options available
to address our national crisis to either providing armed guards in schools or
not. Not only is this a false dichotomy, it also evidences the intellectual
dishonesty of refusing to identify the elephant in the room – the failure of
the very gun policies which LaPierre is defending.

The reality is that we simply cannot deal with this
crisis until we recognize all the factors which have given rise to it. And in
our discussions of them, all the bluster of self-righteous indignation in the world cannot
overcome fundamental problems of intellectual dishonesty and intellectual
cowardice. If Wayne LaPierre wants to have any real intellectual or ethical
credibility, he will have to come clean with his fellow Americans about the
role that unlimited access to guns and the failure of a policy which has put
them into the hands of two out of three Americans plays in this crisis. Until
then, he is relegated to seeing the monsters driven by demons in the other that so clearly appear to haunt his own soul.

A couple of weekends ago I was invited to go to Seaworld along
with my husband and our niece. Our friend, Bill, receives day passes to the theme park as a
result of participation in the VA equivalent of the United Way. It’s a yearly
event and I look forward to what is inevitably a long but enjoyable day at the
park.

Truth be told, my favorite attraction is the underwater
dolphin viewing room, complete with its plate glass windows providing front row
seats to the dolphins swimming and playing in the artificial lagoon above it. Every
time we go there I tell Andy that I want to live there though I’d guess that I’d
find that space pretty confining after awhile.

At some level I feel the entire premise of Seaworld is
cruel, cramming all those wild animals into confined spaces for the purposes of
entertainment of the human animals. No doubt, the dolphins are simply biding their time before they are transported up to the waiting space ships and will tell us "So long. Thanks for the fish" enroute to their new homes. But I am always thankful for the
opportunity to see animals up close that I would probably not have a chance to
see otherwise and to engage in an intentional appreciation of the beauty of the
good Creation for a day. And I assuage my guilty conscience with the belief
that Seaworld generally has a reputation of taking good care of their animals
and occasionally rescuing injured or sick animals as well.

My 13 year old niece, Grace, is quite the marine
biologist. She has two 55 gallon tanks in her bedroom and is a walking Wikipedia
when it comes to these fish. As we were walking through the Shark Encounter,
the long plexiglass tube which allows people to observe a wide variety of
sharks and other large fish, the father of the family ahead of us pointed to a
given shark and identified it as a Mako Shark. Misidentified it, actually.
Grace immediately piped up and said, “No, that’s not a Mako Shark, it’s a Blue
Shark. And there’s a Hammerhead. And over there’s a Tiger Shark.”

Suddenly I realized that it had gotten pretty quiet in
the Shark Encounter. Everyone in the tube had stopped talking and had turned around
to listen to my little niece who had outed herself as a bit of an expert on
marine biology at 13 years of age. That’s my niece, I thought, as I smiled to myself.

Then I noticed that not everyone had been taken in by
Grace’s spell. A boy who appeared to be about 16 was with the family in front
of us whose comments had set off the impromptu marine biology lesson. He held an
iPhone and was furiously texting away. At first I thought perhaps he was
texting a friend to share what he was seeing and hearing. But as I watched him
move through the remainder of the tunnel and out into the park, I realized he
wasn’t seeing or hearing much of anything, he was simply glued to his iPhone.

So here’s this family, all the way from Kalamazoo (or
wherever else they had travelled from) here to see one of the world’s greatest
marine life parks, surrounded by sharks and other sea animals that most of us
will probably never get another opportunity to see. And their kid, whom they’ve
paid $91 to get into the park this day, is so busy playing with his electronic
toys, his weapons of mass distraction, that he cannot even benefit from being
there.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

In 1973, I was a junior at the University of Florida. I
had transferred there from a community college where I had been a big fish in a
little pond. At UF, I had become merely one of the cast of thousands, 27,000 to
be precise, and quickly came to feel pretty lost.

I had been raised in the Methodist Church, a refuge of
sanity in a small town where Southern Baptists were dominant and where
fundamentalist churches such as the Primitive Baptists and the Church of Christ
were their main competitors. The Methodist Church was the place where most of
the teachers in the local high school (like my Dad) attended. There was a modicum of social consciousness there. And while it was hardly a
paragon of depth or critical thought, it was certainly better than any of the
alternatives.

The Methodists maintained a chaplaincy on the edge of the
UF campus. It offered a limited refuge each week from the dorm room I shared
with a nasty, stinky kid from New Jersey and a drug dealer from Lakeland. I
came home from class one afternoon to find the latter sitting with his
supplier, a gun in his face, being threatened with being “blown away” if he
ever “held out on” on his dealer again.

In all honesty, I was pretty depressed by the end of that
first semester, not the least of which came from dealing with my first round of
attempts to come to grips with my sexual orientation. I could often hear the
yellow jackets of suicide buzzing around my ears those days awaiting
opportunities to light and sting. My wrists still bear the scars of those painful though fortunately not fatal stings.

Desperate for some direction, I sought out the pastor at
the Methodist chaplaincy. I began to tell him how frightened I was, how lonely
I felt and how confused I was about where I was going. The man listened with
patience saying little. And then I dropped the bomb about my confusion over my
sexual orientation.

At that point, the man’s face changed visibly, drained of
all its color. He turned away from me to his desk. Without even looking at me
he said, “I think you’ve been studying too hard. Why don’t you go home and get
some rest and come back and we’ll talk in January.” I had no idea what to say except, “OK. Thank
you” and I got up to leave.

What I hold in my memory to this day is the image of the exterior of that
office door as I closed it behind me. I stood and looked at it for a full
minute or so. It was full of dings and thumb tack holes as well as a few errant
pieces of Scotch tape which had all been clumsily painted over with a bright
red enamel. And I remember thinking as I stood there that I was closing the
door to a chapter of my life that day. From that day forward, I would never again be a Methodist.

It
felt like a holy place.

I survived the semester, moved across campus to another
residential housing dorm with two other roommates for the Spring. The following fall
I would move to my father’s fraternity house which had just reopened its
chapter at UF where I would meet my future husband.

For a couple of years I simply forgot about church. I
knew the Methodist Church had no room for me anymore. But I had no alternatives
in mind. In Fall of 1975, I moved to a duplex across town in Gainesville with
my big brother in the fraternity who would later become my partner and then
husband. Away from campus and the
fraternity, I had the space to think once again about my spiritual life.

Right down the street from our apartment was the main
Episcopal Church in Gainesville. I walked by the church by accident one day and
decided to poke my head in the door. It was a century old building, full
of stained glass and carved wood. The place wreaked of incense and candle wax
of liturgies past. It was dark inside with colored pools of light pouring
through the windows, puddling on dark, heavily oiled hard wood floors between
the rows of pews. There was a deep, meditative feeling about that space. It felt
like a holy place. And I had a strange feeling as I sat in the pew that day,
praying for guidance, that perhaps I had found the place I needed to be.

The first night I attended a Sunday evening service there
(because I was inevitably too hung over Sunday mornings from Saturday night
parties to get up and go to church) a few things struck me immediately. The
first was that the priest’s sermon was fairly intellectual. He used
multi-syllable words and didn’t start off with some version of “Hi, y’all!” Clearly,
this was not your mother’s Methodist Church.

The second thing that struck me was that the priest was
black. I’d never seen a black minister of any tradition in any church I’d ever
attended. Indeed, I could probably count on one hand the black people I’d ever
seen in church, period. I felt a sense of cognitive dissonance as I watched
this young priest preach and celebrate the communion at the altar. It was a
strange thing but I felt deep down that it was also a good thing.

A
lot of things were changing….

But this was 1975 and many things were changing. The
Episcopal Church was in the midst of changing its prayer book from the 1929
version with its chopped up, muddled liturgies to a more lyrical modern version
which spoke of “this fragile earth, our island home.” The new BCP would
relegate most of its self-deprecating theology such as the prayer of humble
(humiliating?) access (We are not worth
so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table – Really? Even ants can
do that!) to a Rite I that would find a home at early services with elderly
parishioners. It would incarnate the Anglican via media by placing both old and new liturgical forms within one
book offering a choice to those who would use it.

Perhaps more revolutionary was the change taking place in
its leadership. Women were being ordained priest in the Episcopal Church even
as its boys club clergy had to be brought kicking and screaming into that new reality.
And white Episcopal priests who had been strongly involved in the Civil Rights
movement of the 1960s were now embodying the equality for which they struggled, opening pulpits and altars to people of color.

I looked around the church that night, pondering the provocative
sermon I had heard about social responsibilities, feeling strangely at home in
that place of stained glass, lyrical liturgies, incense and flickering candles,
rejoicing that this church was actually embodying its principles in its own
leadership. And I thought, maybe this church has a place for me.

Two years
later I would be confirmed as an Episcopalian.

A
chaplain to the margins

That seems like a long time ago now and a lot has
happened in my life and in my relationship with the Episcopal Church in the
meantime. It would take another 15 years but I finally came to grips with my
sexuality, a Kinsey 4 just to the gay side of center. I would get involved with
the Episcopal Church’s struggle for justice within its own membership over LGBT
first class citizenship, a struggle which is only just now coming to fruition.

After a brief period studying in the local diocesan seminary for deacons, I would leave my law practice behind and move across the
country to embrace a totally unforeseen role of seminarian studying for the Episcopal
priesthood. I would become a member of a very dynamic multi-cultural parish in San
Jose, CA which, in turn, would launch a 20 year period of traveling and
studying all over Latin America.

Eventually, I would be ordained priest in 1995,
a chaplain to those “at the margins” I was told. But I knew even then that I would
not be able to make my living in parish ministry. And so I would return home to
Florida to complete my education in a doctoral program in religion and society
to teach at the university level.

The “margins” have always proven much further flung than I had originally
envisioned. By moving home and returning to a diocese
with an officially homophobic stance, my function as a priest was relegated to occasionally celebrating for Integrity, the LBGT fellowship of the
church, for the third order Franciscans and in the occasional invitation to
pulpits and altars I have received over the years. And at least for the time being,
connection to parish ministry in any kind of regular form is probably out of
the question.

But the margins have proved far broader than an institution whose control issues too often play out in a confusion of moralism with religion. As the chaplain to the margins, I have celebrated any
number of weddings, unions and officiated at more funerals than I’d like to
imagine, all of them outside the auspices of the church. I’ve blessed any
number of homes and I have offered prayers at any number of interfaith
functions. I was privileged to baptize both of my sister’s babies, preside over
my mother’s graveside service and I led a religious community of exiles from a wide
range of traditions who met weekly in my home over a 13 year period.

None-of-the-Above with spiritual needs

What none of us had foreseen in 1995 when the Episcopal Church
made me a priest “to the margins” was the great diaspora from organized
religion that was coming. The ranks of the unaffiliated have mushroomed over
the past two decades and now a full 1 in 5 Americans report no affiliation with
a religious body. And yet, they remain human beings with spiritual needs, needs
for rites of passage at the deaths of their loved ones, needs for counseling
when confused or frightened, needs for space to voice their anger at the harm
done to them by their former religious affiliations even as they speak of the
need for Spirit in their lives.

I have to doubt the Episcopal Church recognized how
prescient its ordination of a priest to serve as chaplain to the margins would
actually become. In all fairness, it is a chaplaincy that has more often played
out in those margins than inside the church. And yet, my heart – and at least a
portion of my soul - remains Episcopalian.

Latter day epiphanies…

The history I lay out above seems like several lifetimes
ago. Life is largely up in the air for me these days as I struggle to decide
what the next step in my professional life will be. After a long hiatus from any
kind of regular connection with the Episcopal Church, I find myself back in the
pew, occasionally in the pulpit and at the altar. I have learned to be content
to watch others do what I am ordained to do. And I am happy to have some
semblance of spiritual community and connection to my chosen religious
tradition again.

This past Sunday, I found myself having yet another moment
of epiphany that took me back to that night 37 years ago in Gainesville, this time in the parish I have recently come to call home, St. Richards, Winter Park.
I looked at the altar and it suddenly dawned on me that standing there was a
gay priest, a black priest and a woman priest. Kneeling at the altar rail and ringing
the sanctus bells was a middle aged man with Downs Syndrome.

In the congregation around me sat two retired priests,
white, male, straight, with their families. Next to them sat lesbian couples, a
gay couple with their adopted son who also served as acolyte, and a number of families of color from all
over the Caribbean. Over 20 children from the parish ran to the altar steps
when it was time for the children’s sermon and the sea of gray heads, my own included, nodded and smiled at their energetic time together.

It was a little glimpse of the
kingdom of G-d.

The main sermon was provocative, theological but also with
calls to social responsibility in the wake of this week’s massacre of the
children and their teachers in Newtown, CT. Indeed, the service began with five minutes
of silence in their memory which ended with 27 peels of the bells for each child of G-d whose lives had ended so abruptly and so brutally. And as I looked around the
parish that morning, there were many eyes brimming with tears, my own included.

This is a parish working hard at being the church in which "there are no outcasts," to quote its former presiding bishop, where all the children of G-d have a
place at the table; a church which recognizes that faith without works is dead and
calls it to action, avoiding the trap of becoming a mere exercise in spiritual escapism;
a church which nourishes the right brain with robust symbols, beautiful music and
good liturgy; a church which does not require checking your brain in at the
door; a church which works hard at embodying community and hospitality. And to the degree that
this parish reflects the larger tradition of which it is a part, this is a
church worth serious consideration by people seeking Spirit in all the many
forms it takes.

As I walked from church Sunday, making the sign of the
cross with holy water and shaking hands with the three priests lined up outside
the door, I thought to myself, “Now, this
is the church I joined so many years ago.” Deo gratias.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Already two predictable responses have emerged from the
massacre at Newtown. The first is the knee jerk, brainless but particularly
heartless responses from the addicts themselves. A classmate from high school
posted a poster with the inevitable mantra from the NRA which read “More Guns. Less Crime.” Of course, the data show exactly the opposite to be true not only worldwide but also
within the US between jurisdictions restricting guns and those which do not.
Arguing that more guns are the solution to a gun saturated culture which
routinely massacres its school children is a bit like saying the solution to a
forest fire is for fire fighters to dump kerosene on it.

Of course, this is where the marks of addiction begin to
reveal themselves. Addictions are marked by certain characteristics:

-Continued behavior despite adverse
consequences

-impaired control over said behavior

-denial regarding the problematic nature
of the behavior

-adaptation to the behavior and its
negative consequences thus requiring ever increasing engagement of said
behavior to achieve the original effects of its engagement

-with physical and psychological symptoms
experienced when reduction of the behavior is considered or attempted

Now, consider the pattern of behavior surrounding America’s
love affair with guns that we have observed over the past 30 years. Every
single one of those aspects are observable in our national culture.

The second predictable response was in evidence before
the night was over. Teary-eyed mourners filled churches to hear words of hope
in the face of despair while others stood outside the site of the massacre to
light candles. Notes and flowers punctuated with children’s toys and photos will
soon adorn the chain link fence outside this school as a makeshift wailing wall
will unfold for mourners.

As an Episcopal priest I am catholic in my theology and
liturgical in my practice to the core of my being. As a mystic who finds truth
in all spiritual traditions, I honor spiritual images and objects from sacred
stones pointing the four directions to inscriptions from the Quran and at
altars throughout my home. I routinely offer up my prayers as I burn incense in
pots before sculptures of Francis of Assisi, the Guadalupana and Kwan Yin the bodhisattva
of compassion which dot the jungle outside my home.

From a very functional perspective, this is how I live myspirituality. My prayers are focused by the flickering of candles and I am
reminded to pray by the smell of incense. These prayers require no jealous institutional sponsors for validation. They are simply directed to Spirit in all the forms it
takes through the world’s many spiritual traditions. Indeed, on days like
yesterday, lighting incense from a candle burning before a holy image, bowing
my head and saying my prayers is ALL I know to do in the face of meaningless
tragedies like that of Newtown. So I understand the impulse that results in the
makeshift wailing walls and the candle-lit memorial services.

But, I also know that this alone is simply not enough. The
leaving of candles, photos, saccharine notes and stuffed bears may staunch our pain,
perhaps even assuage our guilt, but it certainly cannot bring back our
children, much less prevent future massacres. Yellow ribbons tied around trees
cannot bring back dead soldiers even as they command us to remember them without
considering the senseless waste of those young lives by ill-considered public policy. The
deities we beseech to save us from ourselves between sobs simply never appear. Indeed,
in many ways, these activities, which at best are designed to salve our wounds,
often become forms of avoiding looking at our national addiction to the weapons
of war. Too often our rites of public grieving have devolved into disingenuous, hollow
forms of denial that we have a serious problem.

For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were
to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. 17 The sacrifice acceptable
to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not
despise.(Psalm 51)

Contrary to what deluded souls like Mike Hukabee
would have us believe, G-d is not going to save us from ourselves. Indeed, G-d
never does even if we erect 10 Commandments in every courthouse and require
every public school kid to pray interminable ad hoc evangelical Protestant
prayers each morning. Time and again, desperate prayers have followed irresponsible
behaviors which ignored prophetic warnings of disaster without a changed course.
And time and again, those prayers have been followed by the very disaster of
which the prophets so urgently warned. It is time for G-d’s children to become
adults, to take responsibility for our lives together, to take this beast of addiction
to the instrumentalities of death by the horns and to wrestle it into
submission.

I
will with G-d’s help?

The Baptismal Covenant of the Episcopal Church provides a
healthy way of approaching this task for people of faith. To the series of
promises posed the parents of newly baptized children or adults who are being
confirmed, the response is always two part in nature: I will ….with G-d’s help.

If America is to come to grips with its addiction to the ubiquitous
means of death, destruction and demoralization of our children, we must first
admit we have a problem, like with all addictions. And then we must confront
it. No doubt we will need G-d’s help in confronting this beast but the effort
must always begin with us. We also need to dissuade ourselves of the simplistic
theology of the 12 Steps. The truth is, we are not powerless over this
addiction. It is the work of our hands. We constructed our society in this destructive manner, and we can also construct it differently. That it is difficult does not mean we are excused from confronting our problem.

It is time for America to grow up if for no other reason
than it is getting harder and harder to engage in denial after events like
those of Newtown yesterday. We must allow the incredible pain from the Newtowns
and Virginia Techs and Columbines to be experienced, to break our hearts
leaving them contrite. Unlike the cheap grace of coerced public prayers or imposed religious monuments, that is the sacrifice G-d requires. Pious words from
pulpits and stuffed bears left in front of flickering candles at a massacre
site alone amount to little more than a morbid, empty dramaturgy. Before we can
act, we must end our denials and allow the pain to break our hearts.

The Feast of the Holy Innocents commemorates an event
reported in Matthew’s Gospel in which King Herod seeks to destroy a potential
rival in the baby Jesus and orders the killing of all Judea’s children under
the age of 2. It is unclear whether this was a historical event. Indeed, little
evidence suggests that is so. It is more likely a recasting of Hebrew Scriptural
motifs from Jeremiah’s lamentations over the fall of Jerusalem to the
Babylonians or perhaps even the killing of the first born sons of Egypt on the
night of the Passover.

What’s important about this narrative is that it embodies
the deadliness of a callous public policy which proves destructive to the most
innocent members of a society, its children. It is precisely that pattern we
are seeing play out in America as it refuses to come to grips with its
addiction to the weapons of war.

It is time to pray, America. And then it is time to act.

Collect
appointed for the Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec. 28)

We remember today, O God, the slaughter of
the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms
of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the
designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of
the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

But perhaps more importantly….

From Eucharistic
Prayer C,Rite II, Book of Common
Prayer

Deliver
us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for
strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal. Let the grace of this Holy
Communion make us one body, one spirit in Christ, that we may worthily serve the world in his name.

And from Post-Communion
Prayer, Rite II, Book of Common Prayer

Send
us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and
serve you (through loving and serving our neighbors) with gladness and
singleness of heart; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Post-Scriptum

As I have sought to work through my own grief by writing these words this day, news is filtering in from
Birmingham, Alabama, of a shooting in a hospital. Three were wounded before the
gunman was shot and killed by police. The predatory sickness that is America’s
addiction to firearms has now degenerated to its lowest level of victimhood –
from defenseless children who can only run from their assailants in a hail of
bullets to the sick and injured who can’t even run away.

Dear Lord.

Have
we no sense of decency, America, at long last? Have
we really no sense of decency?

·^
Morse RM, Flavin DK (August 1992). "The definition of alcoholism. The
Joint Committee of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence and
the American Society of Addiction Medicine to Study the Definition and Criteria
for the Diagnosis of Alcoholism". JAMA268 (8): 1012–4. doi:10.1001/jama.1992.03490080086030.
PMID1501306.

About Me

I am a fifth generation Floridian, a fourth generation educator, third generation college educator. My great grandparents were named Reed and Wright so I guess it was fate that I would end up a teacher. I am a recovering lawyer who still holds an inactive license with the Florida Bar (I stopped practice in 1990) and an ordained Episcopal priest. My spirituality is that of an inner world (nature) mystic. I am Franciscan to my very core, a professed member of 26 years in the Third Order Society of St. Francis (TSSF). Andy , my gentle souled, soft-spoken partner of 44 years became my legal husband in 2010 on the steps of the US Supreme Court. He is G-d's greatest gift to my life. I live within two hours of my nuclear family members. Historically I have been a yellow dawg Democrat though my politics are decidedly Green. I hold a Ph.D. in Religion, Law and Society from FSU, an M.Div. from Church Divinity School of the Pacific, member seminary of the GTU in Berkeley, CA, and a J.D. and a B.A. in History and Secondary Ed from the University of Florida. I complete a two year program at Richard Rohr’s Living School for Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, NM August 2017.